If You Meet the Buddha on the Road, Kill Him

And in this turning, we each must go as far as we can in reclaiming any part of ourselves that we have till then disowned.

But there is an apocryphal interpretation of the myth of Creation, which suggests that Eve’s formation from the rib of the lonely, sleeping Adam, was God’s second attempt at finding him a helpmate. When God first “created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him,”4 at the same time, “male and female he created them.”5 An old Hebrew

There are no hidden meanings. Before he is enlightened, a man gets up each morning to spend the day tending his fields, returns home to eat his supper, goes to bed, makes love to his woman, and falls asleep. But once he has attained enlightenment, then a man gets up each morning to spend the day tending his fields, returns home to eat his supper, g

If he will let himself get deeply into the experience of being stuck, only then will he reclaim that part of himself that is holding him. Only if he will give up trying to control his thinking, and let himself sink into his confusion, only then will things become clear.

As the [Hasidic] saying goes, a man must have two pockets into which he can reach at one time or another according to his needs. In his right pocket he must keep the words: “For my sake was the world created.” And in his left: “I am dust and ashes.”3

The living waters draw me back to their shores again and again. They seem to wish to show me that though they are ever changing, yet they never change. The ocean is both endlessly calm and disruptively turbulent, alternately quieting my own inner turmoil, while yet insistently warning me of the dark powers that lie unquiet beneath the water’s surfa

Too often the pilgrim lives as though his goal is to become the horseman who would break the horse’s spirit so that he can control him, so that he may ride safely and comfortably wherever he wishes to go. If he does not wish to struggle for discipline, it is because he believes that his only options will be either to live the lusty, undirected life

But he finds, as we all do, that you can’t make anyone love you. You just have to reveal who you are and take your chances. Oh, sure, you can give a pleasing impression to others, flatter and appease them. Or, you can intimidate other people, threaten and menace them. But whether by cajoling or by coercing, you cannot elicit a gift of love.

There is the image of the man who imagines himself to be a prisoner in a cell.12 He stands at one end of this small, dark, barren room, on his toes, with arms stretched upward, hands grasping for support onto a small, barred window, the room’s only apparent source of light. If he holds on tight, straining toward the window, turning his head just so